George Coupland
Kevin Cox
Yvon Jaillais
Dorota Kwiatkowska
Charlotte Pain
Adrienne Roeder
Sebastian Schornack
Yvon Jaillais did his PhD at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon, France) in the group of Thierry Gaude, where he studied the link between intracellular trafficking and polar auxin transport. In 2008, he moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, California, USA) to study brassinosteroid signaling in the group of Joanne Chory. He was recruited as a CNRS scientist in 2012 to work in the RDP lab (Lyon). There, Yvon Jaillais started a research program on the role of anionic phospholipids in membrane organization, receptor kinase signaling and plant development. His group focuses on the membrane-based mechanisms that allow plant cells to communicate with each other to regulate plant development and environmental interactions. His lab has built tools to image lipid patterns within membranes at multiple scales, and to perturb them with subcellular accuracy. They now address how those patterns are formed and their role in regulating intra and inter-cellular communication in plants.
Dorota is a professor in the Institute of Biology, Biotechnology and Environmental Protection. Her research focuses on mechanical aspects of plant development and organ function. Members of the Dorota group investigate plant growth and function combining biophysical, structural, and developmental perspectives. Focus topics include mechanics of the primary and secondary plant cell walls. Our main contributions are development of methods for quantification of plant growth and geometry at subcellular and tissue scales, the discovery of the elastic deformation gradient across the primary wall layers that is crucial for mechanical signal transduction, and uncovering the underlying mechanism of passive deformation of secondary walls during hygroscopic movements, with important implications for the use of biomimetics.
Charlotte Pain is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, where she leads a research programme investigating how the organisation of plant cells controls their ability to produce and transport proteins. She completed her PhD at Oxford Brookes University before moving into postdoctoral research focused on the organisation and dynamics of the plant endoplasmic reticulum (ER), the membrane network where proteins destined for secretion and other cellular compartments are made and processed.
Charlotte’s research combines plant cell biology with advanced microscopy and quantitative imaging to understand how the physical architecture of cells influences their function. Her research focuses on the ER, a highly dynamic structure that continually changes its shape and organisation in response to cellular demand and environmental conditions. Her research asks whether these changes simply reflect what a cell is doing, or whether ER architecture actively determines what the cell is capable of producing and transporting.
To address this, Charlotte develops new approaches that allow cellular structure and function to be measured and manipulated together. Her research combines live-cell and electron microscopy, quantitative image analysis, correlative imaging and optogenetics to investigate protein production, trafficking and the organisation of the ER across multiple scales. She is particularly interested in developing tools that allow protein transport to be precisely controlled in living cells, providing new ways to test the relationship between cellular architecture and function.
Adrienne Roeder is a Professor in the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology and the School of Integrative Plant Sciences, Section of Plant Biology at Cornell University. She earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences with a minor in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University in 1999. She earned her PhD from UCSD working with Martin Yanofsky in 2005. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech with Elliot Meyerowitz before starting her own lab studying Arabidopsis sepal morphogenesis using a computational morphodynamics approach combining live imaging, image processing, and computational modeling. She has a longstanding interest in plant cell and developmental biology. Her lab studies how cell size and organ size are regulated in plants. Specifically, her group studies how plants generate cells with diverse sizes, ranging from giant to small, through regulating endoreduplication. On the flip side, her group also studies how plants form organs, such as sepals, with reproducible size despite variability of cells in their size, growth, and division. Her lab has an interest how organ size and shape emerge from the coordination of cell growth. Strikingly, her lab is finding that plants utilize stochasticity or randomness to produce robustness and regularity.
Sebastian Schornack is a Research Professor at the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge (SLCU). After earning his PhD from Martin-Luther University Halle in 2006, he co-discovered the TAL effector DNA binding code during postdoctoral work and subsequently researched Phytophthora infestans effectors with Sophien Kamoun in Norwich. Since 2013 his independent lab at SLCU is focusing on Intracellular Plant-Microbe Interactions, supported by Gatsby and Royal Society fellowships. His research investigates the molecular mechanisms of plant colonisation by filamentous pathogens and symbiotic fungi. Utilising diverse plant models from bryophytes to angiosperms, his team pursues comparative and evolutionary approaches to uncover plant processes that govern plant-microbe interactions, ultimately aiding crop protection and improvement.